Adventures of a farmer's daughter in Hawaii

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Food Babe

Just when I thought there would be nothing more for me to blog, it never fails that some anti-GMO post comes up that just infuriates me. Who is the latest awardee of the anti-education/ anti-farmer movement? It’s none other than the Food Babe.

The Food Babe has decided to attack the small farmers of Hawaii that includes my dad, brother, and their farm manager, Neil, as well as the hundreds of others including the organic farmers. She posted an article telling her dimwitted, gullible followers to avoid Hawaiian papayas because they are GMO. She spells out the types that are GMO and the ones that allegedly aren’t. She even tells people to buy papayas from other countries and claims that even organic ones are contaminated.

From her anti-Hawaii papaya post:

She never discloses any real facts about the Hawaii Papaya Industry Association either. She only perpetuates the repeated, factless myths about biotech and tries to make a connection about pesticides to papayas. I laugh because the Environmental Working Group found that papayas have some of the lowest residues of pesticides yet they quickly tell consumers to buy organic variety without any explanation! Nor does Vani mention that the people who grow papayas here are all small family farms!

Why I say the anti-GMO folks are anti-education is because she has no mention about the nature of the modification or how this technology saved the industry here. These activists talk about people being in the dark about GMOs but they obscure any facts from their followers. Facts make people think and thinking is dangerous to this house of cards.

She will never post real science or anything that actually educates people like this.

I’m starting to think that this anti movement is really anti-American at heart. They attack an innovation that has saved the smallest of farmers that have no ties to big ag. They attack the legacies of long time, multi-generational farms here in Hawaii. Majority of the papaya farmers here came to the U.S. with nothing and built themselves up through hard, honest work and dedication. Their families learned the same lessons and carried on those same dreams. The Hawaii farmers are becoming fewer as many are retiring and the next generation does not continue those farms. Vani and her ilk must want people to quit farming altogether with the way she blatantly spreads misinformation.

It’s really disgusting how people like the Food Babe and others like Nomi Carmona of our Hawaii Babes Against Biotech can bring nothing but factless campaigns to our state and feel good about their actions. They perpetuate attacks against the hardest working people I know. They can sit pretty and go on TV or spout their BS about their “expertise” against farmers. How can anyone with a conscious ever do such a thing? Apparently it’s easier to make money lying than it is to farm. These women know nothing about earning an honest living through actual hard work. A broken finger nail is likely devastation to their careers.

I applaud the generations of papaya farmers that toil on their farms everyday to grow these miracle fruits that Vani Hari calls them. Yes, it’s a really good product that millions have enjoyed for nearly 20 years thanks to biotechnology. Our customers who buy our papayas for decades know how healthy these biotech miracles really are. Vani probably doesn’t even know that papayas are staples here and might contribute to why Hawaii has the highest elderly population in the US.

So Vani Hari and the other anti-education activists out there need to get a clue and either work on a farm and grow a comparable crop. They need a lesson in honesty and some work ethics before them come criticizing my fellow farming friends. When the Food Babe can grow a sweet papaya like our Hawaii farmers and talk real science, I might stop criticizing these charlatans of Google.

P.S. Food Babe better adopt her precautionary principle with the imported papayas. Many countries have their own strain of PRSV infecting the papayas making it a natural GMO. Guess she’s better not eat these fruits at all!

Here’s another thing that I hear frequently being stated by many of the anti-GMO activists, “Stop messing with the DNA in our food!” Mark Fergusson, the CEO of the very much anti-GMO Down to Earth Markets also called it, “God Move Over.” I just hate the fear mongering that’s being said about a technology that can do so much for growing food and decreasing our impact to do so.

The goal of the anti-GMO supporters really is to take advantage of the fact that most people have little to no clue as to what GMO really is. When there is a huge number of people who are not literate in biology, chemistry, and basic genetics, you have a nice market of people to target with fear and doubt about this technology.

The activists from the Food Babe, Babes Against Biotech, Hawaii GMO Justice Coalition, Earthjustice, and the Center for Food Safety, will also go on to state that genetic modification of our food stuffs is going to mess up people in some form or fashion. They love to use emotion evoking phrases like, “it’s being shoved down your throats,” to “it’s killing our keiki and kupuna,” We also can’t forget those syringes stuck in food and skull in crossbones bit that they want on this GMO label.

Why are these people so afraid of this thing called DNA? It’s probably because they don’t understand what it is to begin with.

I know that videos are great ways to teach people a thing or two about what DNA really is.

Then when you get a better understanding DNA, let’s talk more about genetics.

I hope you kind of got a general idea of DNA and basic genetics. Now here’s a great video on the story of biotech papayas and how it all comes together.

Note that even with this modification of the genetics, the composition of the papaya is not significantly different than the conventional type. Also note that the transgenic papayas have disease resistance built into it. It is developed to resist the papaya ringspot virus that is spread by an aphid. Even though Gary Hooser has told so many people that GMO means pesticides, it does not at all. It is a technology that can be applied in many different ways.

If you’re still feeling afraid of genetic modification in our food, let’s talk about the food we eat today. Here’s a great example of two different types of tomatoes that have altered genetics done through selective breeding.

These clearly have different genetics to result in these two forms of tomatoes. We can eat both of them and do you think our body can tell the difference? No. The compositions might be slightly different, and the DNA is different but our body can’t tell.

Of course, the next line that a typical anti-GMO activist might say is that these tomatoes don’t have fish genes in it.

The dreaded fish genes!

That’s a funny thought because if you were to eat fish, you are eating fish genes and have you turned into something awful? Ummm… No. So even if a tomato might have genes of a fish, a common blunder quoted by many antis that is not true at all, would your body know this? Nope. Genes are not species specific!

If you watched the videos above, you might figure out that you can’t say that the genes is what’s making you allergic to something either. If you think that there’s a new allergen that’s created by the genetic modification, you’d be wrong too because it is tested and tested for these potential issues. Allergenic proteins are pretty well known and if detected, the trials are abandoned and destroyed.

The same anti-GMO activists decry biotech testing but then listen to Dr. Oz touting those exotic miracle cures. He went from touting goji berries and now garcinia cambogia, which has no allergenic tests done ever but assumed safe. Wouldn’t that worry you more to be consuming these untested things? Nope. Where’s the precautionary principle applied here?

The DNA fearing God Move Over crowd continues to cry about the evil of genetic modification and the need for the precautionary principle, but always misses a key point about this technology. They are worried about what happens when they consume this GMO derived food product because of the unknown genetics. If that is the case, why aren’t they worried about what happens when they consume banana genes or GMO free noni genes? If one is afraid of messed up genes, then they should really fear things like heirloom tomatoes that have really altered genetics.

There’s a lot of DNA in many GMO free products that they should be worried about but don’t even realize it. I’m more afraid of the bacterial genetics of what’s on some organic foods than I am of GMO corn or papaya any day.